Feelin' cruddy in Southern Indiana? Radiation hazards courtesy of your gov't

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My brother, the short-wave radio-computer geek--he is the creator of the biggest Halicrafter site on the net--sent me this rather alarming bit of news on my e-mail yesterday. Thought you would find it interesting..... "I'm listening to the "Power Hour" on 6.89 Mhz (upper sideband) and they were talking about the A-10 warthogs that have been dropping penetrating canisters of depleted plutonium waste near populated areas. They listed many cities, but one on top of the list of concern was Jefferson Proving Grounds (Madison, IN) They warn that the depleted plutonium has been known to travel as far as 60 miles by prevailing winds. The documentation they have is pretty damning stuff. Other cities are Richmond, VA, Dover, NJ, Yuma, AZ, St. Louis, MO, White Sands, NM and much more.

A preliminary search yielded: http://www.ees.lanl.gov/environ.html "At Jefferson Proving Grounds in southern Indiana, human and ecological risk assessments and technical support were instrumental in demonstrating that complete remediation for the Jefferson depleted uranium site was not needed, saving approximately $12 million."

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/nltrs/nltr0051.htm "...Another is at the Jefferson Proving Grounds, Madison, IN where the U.S. Army has acknowledged that "the low level radioactivity [of Depleted Uranium] poses an environmental concern." Source: Draft Environmental Impact Statement, April 1991, U.S. Army, titled "Closure of Jefferson Proving Grounds in Indiana and Realignment to Yuma Proving Ground, AZ." Note that "over 60,000 kilos of Depleted Uranium penetrators were fired." Source: Indiana Department of Environmental Management, report to the Governor. U.S. Army Jefferson Proving Ground evaluation. April 20th, 1988. " This link is very interesting reading."

Hummm. No wonder so many of us are feeling yucky. And look how many friends and family that we have lost to cancer...scary, huh?

-- Leann Banta (thelionandlamb@hotmail.com), January 09, 2001

Answers

Leann:

There was an article in yesterday's newspaper related to this. Depleted uranium is used the the shells of A-10 aircraft to enhance their armor piercing qualities. The risk of exposure to radiation was thought to be slight. However, of 30 Italian soldiers who served in the area after NATO's 78-day bombing campaign in the Balkins, 12 have died of cancer and five have died of leukemia. That is over half of them.

The same ammunition was used during the Gulf War with Iran.

I would expect any cleanup to be difficult. The same enhanced piercing qualities means misses will have gone into the ground, where they might not surface for a number of years.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), January 09, 2001.


P.S.

My oldest sisters husband served on the U.S.S. St. Louis during WW- II in the Pacific. For you war buffs, it was the light cruiser which came alongside the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Franklin when virtually the entire ship was on fire to take off the crew. After the end of the war the St. Louis stayed behind to participate in Atomic Bomb tests. Following tests, their job was to go on surviving ships, measure radiation levels and then hose them down for reuse in another test.

Later in life he began to attend ship reunions. Each year there would be fewer and fewer attendees. When he asked about someone not there, the answer was almost the same - "Oh, he died of cancer." Well, Bill died of colon cancer.

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), January 09, 2001.


Gee, I live just about 20 minutes from the proving ground. People go there to fish. Lots of traffic going up and down 421. Pat's Bulk Food Pantry. Versailles State Park. Really great for my condition- environmental illness, isn't it? I wonder if we glow in the dark?

-- Cindy (atilrthehony_1@yahoo.com), January 09, 2001.

Just found out I actually live about a mile from the proving ground property line.

-- Cindy (atilrthehony_1@yahoo.com), January 09, 2001.

For anyone that lives near those areas, there are some things that you can do to try to minimize the effects of lowlevel radiation or any other kinds of toxicity. First, massive amounts of lemon. A lemon fast for three days if you can handle it, every month. Then there are all of the great antioxidants to EAT...I am a little suspect of all tthe pill forms of things because lots of times the shells of the capsules don't disslove and I don't believe you're getting your moneys worth. Eat seeds. Especially berries, particularly raspberry, blackberries and elder berries. Strawberry has the least amount of cleansing ability. Start eating those apricot nuts, too. There's a site called artrans.com that has all manner of info on nuclear survival and it might not be bad to check on that.

The things I mentioned might all be stuff you already know. If so I apologize for being presumpumtious. There are certainly a lot of otherr things to check into regarding this.

I listen to the same shortwave programs as your brother!!!

-- Doreen (animalwaitress@excite.com), January 09, 2001.



Was Ft.Knox, Ky. on the list? They are always bombing up there, it even shakes my windows and I am 40 minutes south west of post.

-- Cindy in Ky (solidrockranch@msn.com), January 09, 2001.

I used to live 15 ~ 20 minutes from Picatinny Arsenal - Dover NJ. They were always doing public relation stuff to keep the communities at ease. And they've been in trouble with the local enviormentalists for years over just about every kind of pollution that can be related to weapons and testing them.

-- Eric in TN (eric_m_stone@yahoo.com), January 09, 2001.

Shall I add further to your dismay? We lived outside of Terre Haute,In,recently.In talking to my one friend,she told me of all her friends that had died or were very ill,from cancer.She was under 50 and alot of her friends were in their thirties.

This was a really small town in the middle of bean and corn country.It hadn't changed much in the 20 years since Nick had last been there.Virtually no industry.

What they do have is a very high water table.All the farm chemicals,getting into the water supply, very directly.And the town water, and all the well water.

So,you may have that to contend with,as well.

-- sharon wt (wildflower@ekyol.com), January 09, 2001.


There is a book called "World without Cancer" that has a lot of info in it regarding combatting cancer with foods. My friend just got it and she is an extreme skeptic and super science fan and she is only three fourths of the way into it and completely convinced. They do have it at Amazon.

I am not saying that there is no cause to worry, but PLEASE load up on info that will help your body to counteract the chemicals that can kill it. There's alot of suppressed knowledge out there because our medical establishment is 1) just that 2) not interested in getting people healthy because that would destroy their livelihood 3) terribly bureaucratic and complex.

Please do go check out this book and other sites on counteracting radioactivity. I don't think that we are safe from chemical poisoning anywhere because we have dumped so many onto the earth since we figured out how to kill bugs for fun and profit. Best to all of you who are close to these sites.

-- Doreen (animalwaitress@excite.com), January 10, 2001.


There are some iodine pills that you can take to "fill up" your thyroid with iodine so that radioactive fallout doesn't fill it up. You can get these all over through survivalist ads. Don't know if it helps with this type of exposure, but it couldn't hurt, I imagine.

-- Soni (thomkilroy@hotmail.com), January 10, 2001.


Your comment, "A-10 warthogs that have been dropping penetrating canisters of depleted plutonium waste near populated areas" is not true. There is no such thing as depleted plutonium. If you mean depleted uranium, then that probably is true. Depleted uranium is radioactive. What has been altered in the uranium is the isotope U235 has been changed to another isotope. Depleted sound good, like something is now OK. Well, it's not. It is still radioactive uranium!!! Wanton disbursement of uranium or any other radioactive substance by the gov't should be stopped and the perpetrators sentenced to the christian hell.

-- JLS in NW AZ (stalkingbull007@AOL.com), January 11, 2001.

Before y'all get too excited about depleted uranium, please take the time to do a little research using credible sources. Yes, it is radioactive. But, as a mostly alpha emitter, so much of the emitted radiation would be stopped by even the flimsiest piece of paper that worrying about radiation sickness of any kind is ludicrous. Plus the half-life of depleted uranium is so long, approx. 4.5 million years IIRC, the levels of radiation are extremely low. You'll probably get more radiation simply by living in an area with a lot of granite around. Now, OTOH, if you would ingest some of this stuff, either in your lungs or stomach, you could end up with some problems. To ingest an amount that would cause a problem is not likely to happen unless you start eating the slugs of DU that are just laying around everywhere or you were inside a tank that was hit with a DU projectile, in which case inhaling a little dust is going to be the least of any worries you might have. Even then the problems would be related to DU being a heavy metal (like lead) than a radiation problem. This stuff is getting way too much hype in the news for the supposed problems IT caused. That is not saying all the problems that have cropped up in the Balkans, or anywhere else, aren't real, just that they're almost certainly not caused by DU. Maybe something else is going on and if we freak out over the wrong answer we'll never know the correct answer.

-- skip(tx) (pococj@aol.com), January 14, 2001.

Have to agree with Skip, the half life is incredibly long, it's not the radioactivity itself that is toxic, it must be that the metal itself has toxic capabilitiies that we aren't aware of yet, or that some people are sensitive to, rather like lead and flouride being toxic to people with low tolerance/clearance capabilities.

Still, it should not be dumped arbitrarily about the countryside, THAT is annoying as hell!!!

-- Annie Miller in SE OH (annie@1st.net), January 14, 2001.


Sound like someone oughta also do a little research. FYI form Britanica: --- in radioactivity, the interval of time required for one-half of the atomic nuclei of a radioactive sample to decay (change spontaneously into other nuclear species by emitting particles and energy), or, equivalently, the time interval required for the number of disintegrations per second of a radioactive material to decrease by one-half. The radioactive isotope cobalt-60, which is used for radiotherapy, has, for example, a half-life of 5.26 years. Thus after that interval, a sample originally containing 8 g of cobalt-60 would contain only 4 g of cobalt-60 and would emit only half as much radiation. After another interval of 5.26 years, the sample would contain only 2 g of cobalt-60. Neither the volume nor the mass of the original sample visibly decreases, however, because the unstable cobalt-60 nuclei decay into stable nickel-60 nuclei, which remain with the still-undecayed cobalt.

In other words, the longer the half life, the longer the item is radioactive.

I do not believe the gov't has any right to spew radioactive stuff around. Period.

-- JLS in NW AZ (stalkingbull007@AOL.com), January 15, 2001.


Yes, the longer the half-life, the longer something is radioactive. But that is not how a substance's level of radioactivity is determined. What counts is the intensity of the radiation or the amount of radiation per unit time. If you carried the Cobalt-60 around in your pocket, you'd be bombarded with radiation of such high intensity that it would probably kill you, eventually. If you carried a piece of DU in your pocket throughout your entire life you would never notice it, as long as the piece remained intact and didn't enter you through a wound or your respiratory system. The best analogy I can think of would be sun-rays; if you spend 6 straight hours in the sun in one day, you'll get a sunburn, but if you spread that 6 hours over 2 weeks, nothing untoward will happen to you. Yes, DU is radioactive, but the type and level of radiation it gives off in a given period of time is not going to do anything to you under normal circumstances. Shoot, you get more radiation from the ground around you if you live in most areas of the Rockies and much of New England!

-- skip(tx) (pococj@aol.com), January 15, 2001.


From a 1/28/01 Chicago Tribune article:

"Questons about the safety of depleted-uranium munitions first arose after the Persian Gult War when U.S. soildiers came down with a variety of mysterious illnesses. Depleted uranium was investigated as a possible cause. Particular attention was paid to 15 Gulf War veterans who still have fragments of depleted uranium embedded in their bodies. So far, none has developed cancer; and now, after a decade of study, virtually every expert on "Gulf War Syndrome" has ruled out depleted-uranium as a cause."

Article went on to say the scare was intentionally whipped by my some newspapers, such as Il Manifesto, an Italian Communist newspaper, and governments, such as Yugoslavia, for their own purposes.

Article also notes: "Indeed, physicians and medical experts who have looked into the matter have long insisted that it is biologically impossible to contact leukemia from depleted-uranium. Other heath authorities suggested that the polluted environment of Bosnia was a far more likely cause of the soldiers' illnesses."

-- Ken S. in WC TN (scharabo@aol.com), January 31, 2001.


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